The constituency that really matters, Kilgore says, is independents. "Independents are close to 30 percent of the electorate, and there's a lot of evidence that they are turned off by highly polarized campaigns of the left and right. When you energize somebody to vote for you who is already convinced you're right, you pick up one vote. Maybe you don't even pick up one net vote, because if you're energizing voters with a lot of polarizing language, you're probably going to help energize the other party's base, too. A lot of evidence over the years shows that when you turn a swing voter, you pick up two votes. You pick up one for yourself and you deny your opponent one. It's a basic law of mathematics that's kind of important."

Zogby says the DLC is right -- going after non-voters isn't a winning strategy. "You've got a lot of registered voters who registered via 'motor voter,' and they don't even know they're registered to vote. They're at best on the periphery of American politics. And so that is not a winner. What is a winner is finding a center. People used to say you win the Democratic primary on the left and the general election in the center."

The DLC cites Clinton as proof of this, but liberals call that revisionist history. "They paint Clinton as ... a person who could reach out to moderates," says Borosage. "When Clinton ran in 1992, he ran on the most populist agenda we've seen since Harry Truman. In that election, he got probably the same percentage of the vote Mike Dukakis got, the same voters Mike Dukakis got. He won because of Ross Perot. The job then was to forge a new consensus and a new majority. The DLC gets Clinton wrong in 1992, both how he ran and how he won. They pretend he was this great uniter of independent and Republican voters. It's not true. He won because lightning struck."

Of course, this reading actually gives some credence to the DLC view, since it suggests that under ordinary circumstances, Clinton couldn't have won by running as a liberal, and that he won in 1996 by doing exactly what the DLC espouses. But the point Borosage and other progressives make is that Clinton's combination of luck and charisma were unique, and that his success doesn't prove anything about the need to co-opt the center. Trippi actually insists that the former president's incredible skill as a communicator masked the flaws in the DLC's strategy.

Democrats on the left see Republicans winning by catering to their right-wing base and taking positions that are to the right of American public opinion, and they wonder why their party can't do the same instead of playing to focus groups. Why, they wonder, shouldn't their party coddle them in the same way that Republicans indulge the religious right?

The problem is that Democrats and Republicans aren't simply mirror images of each other. "When you give people the option of identifying as liberal, moderate or conservative, a majority of Republicans identify themselves as conservatives," says Kilgore. Liberals, though, make up only a slice of the Democratic Party. Kilgore quotes a Gallup poll showing that only 33 percent of Democrats say they're liberals, while 43 percent are moderate and 23 percent conservative.

No one really represents liberals, which many of them find intolerable. That's why there was an exodus to the Green Party, and that's why there's now so much talk among leftish Democrats of "taking back" the party. Even if Dean doesn't share all their views, he courts liberals rather than trying to marginalize them.

While the DLC sees the ghost of McGovern in this strategy, liberals have a different analogy -- Ronald Reagan.

"Elections create what is acceptable or what is the center," says Borosage. "When Ronald Reagan started running in 1980, he was widely dismissed even among Republicans as a nutcase. But he changed politics in America and created the conservative era we've been living in ever since. I don't think these things are a given. They are forged. The DLC tends to think polls are written in stone and people have specific ideas that can't be overcome."

Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the conservative Heritage Institute, actually agrees with parts of Borosage's analysis.

In the short run, he says, liberal rage is good news for Bush. "In the long run it may not be bad news for Bush," Franc says, "but it might be bad news for a successor. The [Democratic] Party, in order to realign itself in the right direction, may need to undergo some self-examination and a reorientation of what it's all about. Republicans reacted very, very well to their 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Even though Johnson beat Goldwater by an enormous margin, Goldwater had more people out on the streets working for him. It was an early indication of a nascent conservative resurgence that was possible with right kind of nurturing and direction.

"This conservative movement really grew out of that," he continues. "It took a while -- first we had Nixon to deal with -- but it finally led to Reagan's election in 1980. There was kind of a 16-year walk in the wilderness, where people who worked on the Goldwater campaign hung together and formed organizations, formed magazines and journals and helped develop foundations for what was to come."

Liberals, he says, are now walking in their own wilderness. "Getting the most passionate members of the party to do something about that is either going to be a death wish or the beginning of a resurgence, depending on how effectively they deal with themselves."

This isn't much comfort for those who believe that four more years of Bush will irrevocably damage the nation. Kilgore calls it the "death with dignity" strategy -- a kind of extension of the line the Greens took in 2000. Some liberals, he says, "think we're going to lose, so we might as well go out yelling."

Of course, liberals don't accept that their strategy is a losing one in 2004. They believe they can lead America to the left and win rather than follow it to the center. They believe that if most people knew the truth about George W. Bush, they wouldn't vote for him.

"The typical American shares the values of most liberal activists and progressives," says Reich, "but the typical American has been fed a nonstop diet of lies and angry, snide, resentful, bitter diatribes by right-wing radio talk-show hosts and right-wing TV talk-show hosts. The typical American doesn't know what the facts are. He believes that the typical family is getting a $1,000 tax cut. He believes Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for 9/11. He doesn't know that Afghanistan is falling apart, he doesn't know that we're completely unprepared for a terrorist attack. He hasn't been told that most of the corporate scandals of 2002 could happen again because most of the legislation never went anywhere."

Reich is careful not to denigrate such Americans. "These are very intelligent people," he says, "but if you're fed nothing but lies and resentment mixed in with the sort of targets that have nothing to do with the reasons your finances and prospects are poor, you are probably going to buy some of this Orwellian trash. You may be quite thoughtful, but you're not superhuman. Unless or until the Democrats tell it like it is and also stand up for what they believe, America is not going to wake up."

Reich's comment gets to the heart of the debate. There's a sense among activist Democrats that many voters are asleep and that only a blunt, uncompromising message can rouse them. The DLC, meanwhile, is convinced that liberals are a minority not because most Americans don't understand them, but because they disagree with them.

If you start from the premise that Americans have been duped, you can sound like you're "telling people they're stupid for not understanding what we understand," says the DLC's Kilgore. "There's a certain tone of condescension."

But declining to challenge voters also can be a kind of condescension. "I think it's important to keep a sense of humor and be upbeat and even optimistic, but we've got to tell it like it is and also talk about our values," says Reich. "We can't be defensive. We can't assume, as the DLC does, that somehow we're out of step with average Americans."

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